Ford’s Focus

THE ULTIMATE GOOD LUCK is one of my favourite crime novels, so it’s just my luck that it was written by one of America’s literary darlings, Richard Ford. Which means that you’re not really allowed to consider it a crime novel - at least, not in polite society (due to a mis-type, I just realised how close ‘polite society’ is to ‘police society’. Anyhoo …)
  Where was I? Oh yes. THE ULTIMATE GOOD LUCK. So anyway, I had the very great fortune to interview Richard Ford a couple of weeks ago, this because he has a new novel coming out in June, called CANADA, and a wonderful experience it was, too. Richard Ford is entirely charming, a real gentleman, and I found the whole experience hugely enjoyable.
  At one point, I asked about THE ULTIMATE GOOD LUCK, and if he’d written it as a crime novel. Well, yes, he said, sort of; he took Robert Stone’s DOG SOLDIERS for inspiration, but he considered DOG SOLDIERS to be a literary novel.
  CANADA, by the way, opens up like this:

“First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later. The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the courses they eventually followed …”

  I don’t know about you, but that’s about the most noir opening to a novel I’ve read in many a long year.
  But the point of this post isn’t whether Richard Ford writes crime novels, or is entitled to write crime novels and call them literary novels on the strength of his facility for language (for what it’s worth, I think he is, although to be honest I really don’t give a rat’s ass either way). The point of the post is that, when he was talking about THE ULTIMATE GOOD LUCK - and bear in mind that I think that novel is a wonderful piece of writing - he then chilled my blood by saying that that was the novel that made him aware he needed to up his game. What quality, I asked, did he believe his writing lacked? Quoth Mr Ford:

“What I thought was lacking was that I knew a lot more, I could do a lot more, I thought I was capable of more, than I was getting into the book. A sense of humour, a sense of gravity, a sense of complexity, a sense of largeness - those things weren’t getting into the book. They weren’t all getting in at the same time. So I was trying to create a sense that the books would contain my whole array of talents. But I think probably everybody, particularly younger writers, thinks to herself or himself, ‘I’m not getting it all in.’ You know, when John Updike died, there was a piece in the New Yorker, and one of the things that Adam Gopnik wrote about John was that by the end of his life, Updike was fully expressed. And I think in order to write a novel, you have to be fully expressed, leaving nothing out.

  Is it too early to ask about Richard Ford?

  “Oh no, it’s not too early. If I quit tomorrow, or if I died tomorrow, I would die with the satisfaction that I am fully expressed. And by ‘expressed’ I don’t mean that I have ‘expressed myself’, but that I have pushed out of myself everything I can push out. Writing novels is not notably a mode of ‘self expression’. It’s more a mode of employing yourself, employing your brain and your memory, your sense of importance, for the purposes of the book that you write. Some people say, ‘I write for myself’, or ‘I just write about myself’. I don’t think that’s what I do. But I do make use of probably everything myself contains.”

  “But I do make use of probably everything myself contains.” An interesting line, that, I think. Me, I tend to focus on maximising certain aspects of myself when I’m writing, and deliberately excluding others. Maybe I should think more about tossing more into the melting-pot, see how it all boils out …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Irish Times’ Crime Beat

Frank Parrish is a NYPD detective in RJ Ellory’s SAINTS OF NEW YORK (Orion, £12.99, pb), a man who becomes obsessed with the murder of teenage girls. Parrish is initially a conventional character, a hard-drinking loner who subverts the justice system, but it’s hard not to share his obsession, particularly as the young women are being killed for the purpose of snuff movies. Parrish is also haunted by his father’s reputation as one of the eponymous saints, a legendary cop who played a major part in breaking the Mafia’s stranglehold on organised crime in New York, although Frank is convinced that his father was a Mafia pawn. A pleasingly methodical and realistic police procedural, ‘Saints of New York’ is equally impressive as a psychological study of a man on the edge of the abyss, and Ellory invests his gripping plot and strong characterisations with an existential angst that at times makes for harrowing reading.
  Last seen in GONE, BABY, GONE (2008), Dennis Lehane’s private eyes Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro return in MOONLIGHT MILE (Little, Brown, £15.99, pb). The pair have given up their dangerous lives, and have settled into domestic bliss, but Patrick finds himself dragged back into the squalid world he once knew when Amanda McCready, the four-year-old girl he returned to her unfit mother in GONE, BABY, GONE, goes missing again. Likeable but lethal Slavic mobsters provide the narrative tension, and Lehane maintains a page-turning pace courtesy of Patrick’s laconic narration, a downbeat and blackly humorous style that is entirely appropriate for Lehane’s depiction of the banality of evil. Oddly, however, there is a sense that danger is always kept at arm’s length. Recently a father, as is Lehane himself, Patrick prioritises his family over his self-imposed duty to the missing girl. While this may well be an eminently pragmatic way of dealing with drug-fuelled killers, and further subverts the fictional private eye’s time-honoured but implausibly noble instincts to solve a case at all cost, it does have the effect of blunting the novel’s impact.
  Teresa Solano’s A SHORTCUT TO PARADISE (Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99, pb) is a Barcelona-set comic crime offering which heralds the return of the non-identical detective twins Borja and Eduard. The pair are commissioned to investigate the murder of Marina Dolc, bestselling populist writer, on the night she received a prestigious literary award. Was one of Dolc’s rivals the killer? The reader knows from the outset that the hapless novelist (and runner-up) Amadeu Cabestany wasn’t responsible for Dolc’s death, but Cabestany affords Solana ample opportunity to loose comic barbs at the literary snobbishness that denigrates genre fiction in general and crime fiction in particular. The joke wears thin after a while, but Solano also has important things to say, albeit in a deceptively light and humorous fashion, about the global economic downturn, and how formerly upstanding citizens can be driven to criminal actions by forces beyond their control. Given that one of crime fiction’s most important functions is social commentary, Solana’s novel offers a valuable insight into contemporary Spanish life.
  Susanna Gregory’s A BODY IN THE THAMES (Sphere, £19.99, hb) offers an equally fascinating glimpse of a particular time and place, in this case Restoration London. The sixth outing for professional intelligencer - aka spy - Thomas Chaloner, it takes for its backdrop the peace negotiations between the English and the Dutch during the long, hot summer of 1664, as both countries, in theory at least, strive to avoid war. Chaloner investigates the death of his former brother-in-law, Dutch diplomat Willen Hanse, who may well have been murdered by war-mongering hawks from either delegation. Wonderfully researched, the novel is pungent with historical detail, nuggets of which provide any reader who is even vaguely familiar with modern London with plenty of material to delight in. Unfortunately, Gregory’s prose, and particularly her dialogue, is rather stilted, while most of the characters - although based on historical personages - are little more than stiffly drawn ciphers for greed, power and lust.
  Sam Hawken’s debut THE DEAD WOMEN OF JUAREZ (Serpent’s Tail, £10.99, pb) offers another compelling setting, Ciudad Juarez on the US-Mexican border, a city in which locals believe the number of women who have disappeared since 1993, probably murdered, exceeds 5,000. The novel opens with punch-drunk American boxer Kelly Courter attempting to trace his missing girlfriend, Paloma, although the issue is complicated by the fact that Paloma is the sister of Estéban, Kelly’s friend and sometime partner in illicit drug-dealing. These facts are known to Rafael Sevilla, a Juárez police detective, who also takes an interest in Paloma’s disappearance, an interest that is as personal as it is professional. Hawken trades in gritty realism and a haunting sense of loss and hopelessness, and while the novel is very much a singular achievement, it does bring to mind favourable comparisons with Richard Ford’s THE ULTMATE GOOD LUCK (1981).
  The latest in Joseph Wambaugh’s series of ‘Hollywood’ novels, HOLLYWOOD HILLS (Corvus, £16.99, hb) brings together a colourful collection of LAPD cops who work out of the notorious Hollywood Station, splicing their more bizarre tales of working the La-La-Land beat with those of scammers, thieves and reprobates. The multiple storylines and initially bewildering cast of characters may leave some readers disorientated at the beginning, but Wambaugh is a masterful storyteller (this is his 18th novel), and it’s not long before the various elements coalesce into a dazzling mosaic that offers caper-style comedy, downbeat heroics, heartbreakingly authentic detail and unconventional but effective police procedural work. For those unfamiliar with the ‘Hollywood’ novels, Elmore Leonard may prove a useful reference point, with the crucial difference being that Wambaugh’s characters understand that Hollywood is a surreal stage, and that each must play their part to the hilt. - Declan Burke

  This column was first published in the Irish Times.

Burke On Burke; Or, Why Some Writers Are Too Good To Read

Many, many moons ago, when I was still young enough to read without prejudice or expectation, I picked up a book called ‘The James Lee Burke Collection’. I was poor then, or a little poorer than I am now, and three novels in one book represented value for money that was impossible to resist, especially as I was browsing in a second-hand bookstore at the time. The collection comprised TO THE BRIGHT AND SHINING SUN, LAY DOWN MY SWORD AND SHIELD, and THE LOST GET-BACK BOOGIE.
  If you’re a James Lee Burke fan, you don’t need me to tell you that the collection, even if I’d paid a hundred quid for it, would have been good value for money. Even the cover was fabulous, featuring a moody, sepia-toned black-and-white shot of a wrecked and gun-shot car abandoned on desert flats, a dark and stormy sky brewing overhead. As for the novels themselves, well, you could have substituted the car on the cover for any of the protagonists. Men gnarled and worn down, sand-blasted by lives lived too hard on the edge of nowhere. When I think of those novels now I think of Cormac McCarthy’s border trilogy, of Richard Ford’s THE ULTIMATE GOOD LUCK, of Raymond Carver and Hemingway’s TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT.
  That’s not to suggest that James Lee Burke is a writer on a par with literary giants such as McCarthy, Carver, Ford and Hemingway, or trying to sneak Burke, who is marketed as a crime writer, into the literary pantheon through the back door. I’m saying, definitively and brooking no argument, that James Lee Burke writes novels so good that he’s entitled to have the likes of McCarthy, Carver et al compared (favourably) to James Lee Burke, and I can only pity anyone who is so blinkered as to be blind to that fact.
  The first time I walked into a bookstore after EIGHTBALL BOOGIE was published (a fine emporium in Galway called Charlie Byrne’s, as it happens), said tome was nestling on the shelf beside those of James Lee Burke. Even at the time, high on the improbability of it all, I didn’t kid myself that EIGHTBALL deserved to be in the same shop, let alone on the same shelf; still, it was nice to see it there, if only for the incongruity. Even now, looking at the copy of The James Lee Burke Collection I’ve fished down off the shelf, I’m getting a shiver of anticipation at re-reading those novels yet again at some distant point in the future.
  So how come I’ve never read a Dave Robicheaux novel? Well, it’s complicated. Partly it’s to do with the sheer volume of Robicheaux novels (18 at the last count) and no longer having the kind of reading time that would allow me dive in with THE NEON RAIN and work my way forward; but mainly it’s because the writer part of my brain (tender, fragile, endlessly prone to self-doubt) understands that repeated exposure to James Lee Burke does very little to promote confidence in a writer. To read one great novel is one thing, and there are few pleasures to beat accidentally stumbling across a terrific novel; and nothing pleases me more, when I do discover a great novel, than to be in a position to trumpet the good news from the rooftops. But to willingly subject myself to repeated excellence such as James Lee Burke offers? At least Cormac McCarthy has the good grace to publish a novel only once every five or six years, or more; and Hemingway and Carver had the good grace to die, and so on; but Burke does it year after year after year.
  I do look forward to that distant point in the future, when the kids are reared and my fortune made, and I’m sitting on the balcony of my pension on a remote Greek island, a pomegranate sun sinking into the bottle-green sea, and reaching up to the bookshelf for THE NEON RAIN. Until then, though, I think James Lee Burke will have to wait, even if the signed copy of THE GLASS RAINBOW I received from Irish crime fiction’s most dedicated friend, Noo Yoik’s Joe Long, sits temptingly on a shelf within easy reach …
  All of which is a roundabout way of pointing you towards a rather fine piece the Dark Lord John Connolly published at his interweb lair, which is the introduction he wrote to a new and limited edition of THE GLASS RAINBOW published by Scorpion Press. To wit:

“For many of my generation of mystery writers, James Lee Burke is the greatest living author in our field, and one of the most accomplished literary stylists in modern American letters. For better or worse, I would not be writing without his influence, and all that I have written, I have written in his shadow. To borrow a phrase used by Jack Nicholson of Marlon Brando: “When he dies, everybody else moves up one.”
  “Burke’s preeminence is due, in no small part, to the manner in which he came to the mystery novel. Before publishing, in 1987, The Neon Rain, the first book to feature the recurring character of Dave Robicheaux, he had read little in the genre, the work of Raymond Chandler and James Crumley apart, so he approached the task of writing a mystery largely freed from any obligation to the perceived requisites. The books that have emerged in the decades since are, in a sense, only incidentally mysteries: they are, first and foremost, literate, literary, socially engaged novels. To read them is to encounter a great novelist applying his gifts to a sometimes underrated form, reinventing and reinvigorating it by his presence …”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

The Lone Ranger and Toronto

Canada is justifiably lauded for many things, but gritty urban noir isn’t one of them. Unless, of course, you’re one of the cognoscenti who’s read John McFetridge’s (pictured right, in classic ‘having cake and eating it’ mode) ‘Dirty Sweet’ (2006) and ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ (2007). Pared-down tales of Toronto’s dark underbelly, the novels have been favourably compared with Elmore Leonard’s Detroit-set stories for their smartly observed characters, sharp dialogue, and a willingness to go beyond simplistic characterisations to explore the complex nature of crime and criminality.
  His latest offering was published last year in Canada as ‘Swap’, but arrives in the US bearing the title ‘Let It Ride’. It’s his best novel yet, a distillation of the elements that made the previous novels such compelling reading, and yet it’s a complex story of interwoven motivations that virtually defies a synopsis. John? Can you tell us what it’s all about in fifty words or less?
  “My publisher would love it if I could,” he laughs. “It’s about how relationships change over time, how the balance of power shifts ... It’s about an ex-marine who comes to Toronto from Detroit to set up a supply line for drugs from a guy he met in Afghanistan who’s now a member of a biker gang. And he meets a woman who’s robbing spas and wants to rob the bikers. And there are cops ...”
  Before John McFetridge, Toronto revelled in the name of ‘Toronto the Good’. Is it true that he’s personally responsible for the steep rise in Toronto crime statistics? Is it even safe to visit Toronto these days?
  “Yes, this is true, the only crime in Toronto is in books, otherwise it really is New York run by the Swiss. No crime, clean streets, all the people friendly all the time. Honestly, though, almost everything that happens in my books has its roots in something that actually happened here, from the closed-down brewery being used as a giant grow-op to the eight bikers killed in one night, to the highest ranking narcotics officers on the Toronto police being arrested for drug dealing.”
  As in all good crime writing, McFetridge’s tales explore how conventional notions of street-level criminality impacts on all strata of society, a pervasive poison that goes right to the top of the power structure. Is there a moral dimension to writing that kind of fiction? Or is crime fiction purely an entertainment that reflects the world we live in?
  “If it accurately reflects the world we live in,” he says, “then I think that’s the moral dimension. I try to show the circumstances that allow the criminals to operate, the ways that they justify criminal behaviour to themselves as being just business, and the internal politics and the restrictions on the police that make it difficult to catch these guys. Any conclusions are up to the reader.”
  McFetridge gets compared to Elmore Leonard quite a lot. Does that ever get boring?
  “It’s certainly not boring yet, though he must be getting tired of the number of writers being compared to him. I think it’s a style of writing that’s almost a genre of its own by now. I think of it starting with Hemingway and short stories like ‘The Killers’ and ‘Fifty Grand’ and then maybe it split into crime and literary with Elmore Leonard, and everyone who gets compared to him in the crime camp, and people like Richard Ford and Raymond Carver in the literary camp.”
  Are there any writers who make him you bite his fingers with envy?
  “Lots. So many. And the great thing is there are more all the time, every year more writers come out with debut books that are so good.”
  That said, McFetridge is of the opinion that there should be more good writers getting published every year.
  “I know of a few very good writers,” he says, “who’ve had a number of books published, who are having trouble finding a publisher for their new work. More and more I see any book that falls outside the easy description, that’s difficult to categorize or take risks - all the things that literature should do - having trouble finding a publisher. I can understand the employees of the publishing companies having bosses to answer to who have shareholders to answer to, so the drive becomes the most amount of profit in the shortest time above all else, but that mentality isn’t really the roots of publishing.”
  To that end, McFetridge has recently taken the radical step of setting up a writers’ co-operative organisation.
  “The idea is a kind of novelists version of the original United Artists,” he says, “a company run by the artists. Democracy sounds like a great idea but it’s messy and hard to work on a day-to-day basis, but I’d like to try. If the co-op members are all people who love books and who love literature and that’s their main priority, then I think it’s possible they could do great things. I’m not suggesting it be a non-profit organization (at least not on purpose) but that the drive for the most amount of profit possible not be the main decision making factor all the time.”
  It’s a fascinating concept, especially given the technological advances of recent years, which should in theory make it a lot easier for writers to connect with readers while minimising the number of middle-men involved in the process. For more info, clickety-click here ...
  Meanwhile, do yourself a favour and check out John McFetridge’s superb ‘Let It Ride’. If its quality is anything to go by, Toronto’s Lone Ranger won’t be riding away into the sunset any time soon.

  This article was first published in Crimespree Magazine.

On Coincidences, Happy Accidents And The Possibility Of Magic

A Grand Vizier writes: “‘And so / The beginning is near / And we face / The opening curtain …’ The uncorrected proofs of THE BIG O arrived in the post from Harcourt yesterday, sparking all kinds of conflicting emotions in the Grand Viz’s heaving-but-manly breast. Delight and pride, obviously, that a life-long dream has inched another step closer to fruition, given that, as with the niche genres of Western movies and jazz music, America is the spiritual home of the crime novel. Yes indeed, I shall – for a moment or two at least, on September 22nd – be a bona fide Yankee doodle dandy.
  “The delight and pride lasted all of three seconds, of course, after which I was assailed by the usual doubts and uncertainties. How will it be received? Are American tables as wonky-legged as Irish tables, and thus in need of a one-size-fits-all book to prop up bockety workmanship? Will the book sell well, badly, or at all? Will Elmore Leonard and / or Barry Gifford sue? Questions, questions …
  “Coincidentally enough – especially given that THE BIG O has its fair share of coincidences – the proof edits of its sequel, currently labouring under the unlikely title of THE BLUE ORANGE, arrived on the same day. The woman behind the metaphorical green pen, the inimitable Marsha Swan of Hag’s Head Press, pronounced herself reasonably satisfied with the contents, declaring that it largely replicates the good things about THE BIG O, only moreso. She has some issues with various aspects, of course, as any self-respecting editor would, but nothing to cause the Grand Viz to throw himself from the battlements of CAP Towers in a veritable tizzy of despair. Happy days.
  “Naturally, once the correction process begins, the entire story will reveal itself as utterly incomprehensible, totally unbelievable, and collapse into a heap of dust. But we don’t have to worry about that until Monday. Huzzah! In the meantime, we’re going to take the fact that the corrections arrived on the same day as THE BIG O’s uncorrected proofs as A Good Omen.
  “That’s not a very logical state of affairs, but then life – and particularly the writing books bit – is rarely logical. That’s not to say that writers are necessarily a superstitious bunch, but most writers are more than pleased to embrace the concept of ‘happy accidents’. As often as not the writing process will involve a blind reaching forward into the darkness in the hope of finding some meaning or cohesion to the chaos and anarchy you’ve established, and only belatedly discovering that you were always aware of where the Eureka! moment lay, you just had to wallow in the bath long enough for it to drift into the front of your brain. The sparkity-spark fusing of synapses, the unnatural juxtaposition of two or three or four factors coming together in a situation you might have found yourself in ten or twelve years ago, that throwaway remark a secondary character made in Chapter 3 – suddenly the cave explodes into light and the paintings on the wall start to dance.
  “A confession: I’m not a good writer. By that I mean, as I’ve said before, that I’m not a naturally instinctive elegant writer. When it’s going well for yours truly, it means that the grubbing out of words, one painful syllable at a time, is progressing at an unnaturally rapid pace – a thousand words in a three-hour session would represent a good day at the desk for the Grand Viz. That micro-writing approach also applies to such fripperies as plotting and narrative arc – although I usually have a general idea of how I’d like things to work out, the plotting tends to run roughly a page or two ahead of the writing. I like it when I’m surprised by something a character might say or want to do, and being curious as to what they’ve cooked up in my absence is one of most powerful draws that brings me back to the desk every morning. That sounds a little infantile, certainly, but here’s the thing – I heard Richard Ford interviewed on the radio once, and he spoke very eloquently about how meticulously he plots his novels before he begins to write. As a callow page-blackener – I’d yet to have a novel published at the time – I thought that I certainly didn’t have any right to argue with Richard Ford. But I also thought, y’know, where’s the blummin’ fun in that?
  “Maybe writing isn’t supposed to be fun. The publishing business is exactly that, a business. And the most successful writers will very likely be those who approach the process of writing in a pragmatic way, asking themselves what the reader wants and delivering exactly that. And good luck to them all.
  “But here’s the other thing. Being an adult with a young child, as yours truly is delighted to be, means becoming something of a machine that benefits from being pragmatic, logical and forward-planning. But even adults with young children get time off, and the Grand Viz gets to spend his time off writing stories. There isn’t a lot of that kind of time available, so the last thing he wants to do is waste that precious time and imagination space being logical and pragmatic. What he does like to do is open himself up to happy accidents, coincidences and the possibility of magic. Which was why he was so delighted when Reed Farrel Coleman (right), so generously quoted on the back of the U.S. edition of THE BIG O, embraced the coincidences in the story so whole-heartedly, and in the spirit they were intended. Because the writing process itself – for yours truly, at least – is heavily informed by those happy accidents, coincidences and the possibility of magic.
  “Yep, that sounds dangerously hippy. But here’s the other-other thing. How the brain – the mind, the imagination – works is still largely a mystery, even to neuroscientists. Why certain synapses should fuse and produce certain emotional reactions, for example, can be explained by chemical secretions as a response to a given situation. But when you go deeper, all the way down to the quantum level that sustains and generates everything we are and can know, what prevails is chaos and anarchy. It may be that we are yet not smart enough to discover the patterns in the apparent randomness, and it may well be that there are no patterns to be discovered. Either way, at least for the time being, yours truly is entirely content to embrace all those happy accidents, coincidences and the possibility of magic.
  “Naïve? Yes. Impractical? You could argue so. Fun? Most certainly.
  “It may not be a very logical way of conducting a writing life, but yours truly will go on not just embracing but anticipating those happy accidents. The day the writing ceases to be fun is the day I hang up the quill. Peace, out.”

The Ultimate Good Spoof: Richard Ford Graces The Bored, Sorry, Boards

As part of the 'Abbey Talks ...' season, Richard Ford (right) will swing by The Abbey on June 6 to do a reading, shoot the shit about scribbling and very probably the plug the bejasus out of his latest, The Lay of the Land. We'll be there, if only to gag Critical Mick's inevitable heckling, and also to ask why the hell ol' Fordie doesn't write more novels along the lines of The Ultimate Good Luck and quit bugging us with all that meaningful shite about sportswriters and their mid-life crises. Tickets come free but you'll need to book in advance: 01 - 8787222.